Anyone that knows me, knows that I'm not a fan of outsourcing Canadian jobs to foreign countries. For example call centers. We've all had the experience of calling up a service providers customer support number, only to reach someone in Pakistan, or India or some other far flung nation. Granted, often times these calls are fielded right here in North America by immigrants or such that may sound foreign, but are actually as Canadian as you and I. I digress..
The point is, we've all experienced a similar situation. And the majority of us have wondered why with such high unemployment rates in our own country, do our corporations and businesses send jobs overseas. And that leads to the inevitable outrage about corporations sourcing cheap labor yadda yadda yada.. Well, there is a significant amount of the blame to be laid on said corporations to be sure. Companies that have experienced profit margin increases year after year, yet still produce layoff after layoff as they outsource more Canadian jobs.
I've developed a rather unique perspective on this as of late. The company I work for outsources a large amount of work from my department to one company in Florida, and another in India. Now, in my particular department there are roughly a dozen of us doing what we do. Our company brings in however, enough work that could keep at minimum, 40 people employed in my position. Yet we're still at that low staffing level, and hiring only happens incrementally. Say, 1 new person every 2 months or so.
Corporate greed right? No.
Out of the 3 departments in the section of the company I work in, two of them are VASTLY understaffed. Mine, and a related department. Now, the work we do in my department can very easily be outsourced, but here's the thing; the other department can't be. For reasons that I can't explain specifically, the other department needs to have the work done here. No outsourcing. Period.
So why don't they hire? Well, I live in a city in eastern Canada that has been hit hard with regards to employment losses over the last decade. Our primary source of jobs were several mills around the city. The last one of which shut down a few years ago. You would think it would be easy to find employees no?
No.
I've come to the conclusion that a large portion of the unemployed are such, because they either don't want to work, or they think too much of themselves. The company I work for hires people with no background, no criminal check, no specialized qualifications needed. It's not call center work, and it's very respectable pay. Yet they can't seem to find anyone who wants to work here. People either get the job, excited about the amount of money it pays, and quit three weeks later when they realize they're expected to WORK for that money, or they just can't handle the workload and give up.
So I've come to the opinion that, while I think outsourcing is a horrible scourge to have ever been unleashed on Canadians, it's a scourge we brought on ourselves! That section of the population that doesn't want to work, along with those who feel that they deserve better than what they're being offered, despite having no real credentials to warrant it.. You are the people who made outsourcing a reality. YOU are the people who first put it on the table. YOU are the people who made the greedy corporations aware of such a profitable system. And most importantly, YOU are the people who provided them with the justification to do it.
As I said, I live in a community with a high unemployment rate, and there's no time of year that this fact is as obvious as right now during the holidays. Some of those unemployed are legitimately so. Sick, elderly, single mothers who can't afford day care.. not everyone is just a lazy bum. But the next time I hear a single white male, in his mid 20s, that's spent 2 years in college and is now complaining that "there's no work here" I'm going to get a map, and point out India to him. And I'll tell him "Your job is over there, go get it you lazy bitch."
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